EBay acquires Terapeak to provide more analytics to marketplace sellers

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EBay today announced another acquisition today that underscores the company’s current focus on building out better data tools for third-party sellers on its platform, to help it compete better with the likes of Amazon and other marketplaces to attract their business. It’s acquiring Terapeak, a Toronto-based startup that has built a platform that crunches data about supply, demand and pricing to help guide companies on what to sell and how to price it.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Terapeak had raised around $5 million in funding with the only investor disclosed on Crunchbase being Georgian Partners.

This is eBay’s 60th acquisition, and notably the last three (including this one of Terapeak) have all been geared at providing better data to eBay users — specifically its sellers and shoppers. SalesPredict, which it acquired in 2016, is in a similar area as Teradata, providing more datapoints to sellers to help them figure out what to sell and when to sell it. Corrigon, meanwhile, is a visual search engine eBay acquired for around $30 million also last year, geared at helping to make those third-party products more easily discoverable on eBay.

Making sales is the name of the game for eBay: it’s not only important for the company’s own bottom line, but proving its ability to move merchandise is a crucial part of eBay continuing to attract inventory and sellers to its platform.

Although eBay’s last three acquisitions have been geared towards this end, it does not mean that this is a new strategy for the company: eBay has long been interested in more than being just a site for people to visit to buy and sell things, but it’s also been through a lot of changes in its backend operations, selling off eBay Enterprise, Magento, and other operations over the last several years as part of its restructuring (which also included spinning out PayPal).

Terapeak had been working together with eBay prior to this deal, and this will be about integrating more of the company’s tools into eBay’s Seller Hub.

“Nearly two million sellers currently manage their eBay business on Seller Hub. Expanding Seller Hub to provide additional capabilities from Terapeak will help our sellers be even more successful and enable them to more effectively manage their businesses on eBay,” said Bob Kupbens, Vice President of B2C Selling at eBay, in a statement. “We are committed to being the best partner to our sellers as we look to create the most powerful selling platform. The integration of Terapeak’s functionalities into Seller Hub – from sales history and performance enhancement opportunities to price guidance and comparisons – will continue to help eBay’s merchants scale their businesses on eBay.”

It also sounds like Terapeak will, as a result of this deal, work exclusively with eBay.

“eBay’s planned acquisition of Terapeak makes so much sense for everyone involved, particularly for our customers,” said Kevin North, President and CEO of Terapeak, in a statement. “We are excited to continue our vision of empowering merchants to discover what to sell on eBay and how to optimize their listings for maximum performance. Over time Terapeak’s capabilities will become naturally integrated with eBay’s Seller Hub, therefore becoming more robust and providing merchants with a single place to manage and elevate their ecommerce business.”

The transaction is expected to close before the end of 2017, and while Terapeak will report to Kupbens and Sunil Rajasekar, VP of Seller Experience, its employees will stay in Canada.

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